I will leave it to Matt to talk about the Simpsons panel, which I just walked past the line for. It took me 10 minutes just to walk the line. Then I paid $4 for a pretzel and sat down on the floor to gnaw it. (Dry, because my personal beliefs prevent me from paying $3 for a soda.) It is Saturday afternoon at Comic-Con and I’m bottoming …

Yesterday afternoon I went up to a door on the second floor of the San Diego Convention Center. I twisted in the wind with a skeptical security guard for 20 minutes before a Disney publicist came to rescue me. She escorted me out to a white table on a sunny terrace outside. I zealously forbade the other journalists who were milling …

Spent two hours in the Warner brothers indoctrination chamber this morning: Where the Wild Things Are, The Book of Eli, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Box, Jonah Hex, and (the reason I came, as they intuited, since they put it last) Sherlock Holmes.

Comic-Con doesn’t make it easy for you to like things. There’s so many fans here, …

This is what it’s like to be press at Comic-Con. It’s not that you don’t feel like an ass, when you walk past a mile-long line to get into a big screening, fans who have sweated and ground out the hours it took to have a reasonable shot at a reasonable seat. You wave your flimsy little purple construction-paper pass, go in the side …

I type this from the WIRED Cafe, where they have wifi and free food and also deafening house music.

Spend any time at all at Comic-con and it’s hard not to go all Hunter Thompson. There’s just so many damn people. Nerd culture has gorged and gorged, and then bloated, then collapsed under the weight of its own flesh. The excess flesh …

Tonight I went over the top in the first wave at Comic-Con: doors opened 6:00 on the dot.

First impression is of rampant confusion. The show floor is a ravening fleshpit. Who the eff are all these people elbowing me out of the way so they can take a picture of a 6 ft Buzz Lightyear made out of Lego? I don’t identify with them. It’s …

I’ve spent the past few days at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter convention in San Francisco.

It’s a pretty intense scene. Something like 1,000 (I’m speculating) Potterphiles in one hotel in downtown SF. You immerse yourself in it, and the whole non-Potter-related world just vanishes. I was going to say it’s like being at Hogwarts, but …

This strikes me as not a foolish idea. There’s room for more players in that market, and B&N’s general failure to challenge Amazon convincingly online has been a huge fail. This gives them another shot at becoming meaningful in that market. Plus, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is …